Lots Of New ARM Hardware To Be Supported By Linux 3.17

Several new ARM devices will be supported by the in-development Linux 3.17 kernel while some less-than-optimally-supported ARM hardware is also getting stripped from the mainline kernel tree.

Olof Johansson emailed in the large batch of ARM changes today for the Linux 3.17 merge window. Some highlights for the pull request consisting of around 750 patches include:

- Support for the Samsung s5pc100 and s5p64xx hardware was removed. Dropping the s5pc100/s5p64xx support comes after the code for these ARM platforms lacked active support for a while and there was no developer interest in maintaining/improving the level of support.

- Lots of the NVIDIA Tegra platform code is now shared so it can be used by upcoming Tegra 64-bit hardware.

- The Rockchip RK3288 SoC is now supported. The Rockchip RK3288 is based upon a quad-core Cortex-A17 design with Mali-T764 GPU. The SoC claims to be the first to support real 4Kx2K video decoding and the first SoC with total HDCP 2.x security. The Rockchip RK3288 is also supported by Linux 3.17.

- Improved Hardkernel Exynos 4 based ODROID board support.

- Gumstix Pepper board support with its AM335x SoC from Texas Instruments. The Gumstix Pepper single-board computer is powered by the Cortex-A8 and has 512MB of system memory, WiFi, Bluetooth, and microSD for storage.

- Support for the Texas Instruments evaluation board for the AM437x family of SoCs. The TI AM437x is based on an ARM Cortex-A9 core and comes in AM4379, AM4376, AM4378, and AM4377 models.

- Allwinner A23 SoC support. The Allwinner A23 is a dual-core Cortex-A7 1.5GHz SoC for tablets that has a Mali-400MP2 GPU. With this basic A23 support also comes support for the A23-using Ippo tablet.

- Allwinner A31 Hummingbird support. The Hummingbird A31 is a $70 development board using the quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with PowerVR SGX544MP2 graphics, 1GB of DDR3 system memory, 8GB of flash storage, and microSD slot. There's also Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n WiFi.

- Tegra30 Apalis board support.

As soon as the Linux 3.17 kernel is further along into its -rc releases we'll be here at Phoronix with our usual ARM and x86 Linux benchmarks.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.